Dear Everyone: Stop Calling 911 If Your Cable Is Out When Breaking Bad Is On

from the breaking-emergency-services dept

Unless you’ve been living under a rock lately, you have surely heard about AMC's hit show Breaking Bad, featuring Bryan Cranston cosplaying Gordon Freeman while making a ton of drugs and generally being an all-around badass. Fortunately for this story, journalistic integrity doesn't really include my opinion of the show, because I watch it enough that my dog and my fiancé can now recite the proper cooking method for a batch of blue crack-speed, which is a strange thing to hear from a dog, I have to tell you. Add to that AMC's being rather awesome when disputes with Dish Network prevented subscribers from seeing it on their TVs and I have something of a fanboi relationship with the show.

That's what happened last night in southern Connecticut when affected Optimum Cable subscribers decided that missing an episode of Breaking Bad or Eat Drink Love was akin to suffering a major heart attack. Service was down for about two hours during primetime because of a power outage in Norwich.

Confused as to what to do and too impatient to wait until the next day, people started calling 911. That unsurprisingly pissed off emergency dispatchers.

The result of this pissing-off of dispatchers was for emergency services to engage their snark-emitters on social media, informing everyone that abusing 911 services could result in arrest and that they wouldn't get cable in prison, either. Not bad, but I wonder how many of them had to resist the urge to dispatch SWAT to each and every caller to administer a bit of the old scared-straight tactic, because if my Gram-Gram needed an ambulance and couldn't get one because someone's cable was out, I'd be inclined to go full-psycho on them.

So, please, people of the world and, more importantly, Connecticut, don't call for EMS because you can't watch Breaking Bad. Instead, Gawker offers a list of more productive activities you could engage in, such as swearing, eating a cookie, or maybe just wait until the morrow when AMC makes their episodes available on iTunes.

Of course if it had been someone calling 911 to report a neighbour infringing their TV enjoyment license by watching Breaking Bad through their window, then I'm sure the SWAT team would have been there in a heartbeat.

This is worse than McDonald's getting your order wrong

Re: This is worse than McDonald's getting your order wrong

To be fair he paid for a product he did not receive and was stonewalled. There are probably a hundred better ways of dealing with it but jail time? Seems like a greater waste of time/resources than a cop asking Mc D's to give the man what he paid for.

Or...

Contact the cable provider and insist on a refund for the day + rebroadcast of the show... Even if they say NO, you realize that the cost to handle the call will cost them more than you paid for the inability to view your favorite time-waster...

wow

Since moving to CT about 7 years ago, there have been a lot of times that I've been slightly embarrassed to admit that I live here. This is not one of those times. I am not slightly embarrassed, I am down right ashamed...

Life threatening?

"911 should be called for Life Threatening Emergencies ONLY."

I can't believe the police department is saying that. It's just not true. If someone stole your car ten seconds ago, that's not life threatening, but it's also totally appropriate to call 911. If my house is on fire and there's nobody inside and no other houses nearby, that's not life threatening either, but again 911 is the preferred method of reporting it. If you fell out of a tree and think you just broke an arm and a leg, you are not likely to die from that even without medical attention, but yet again 911 is what you should call.

"The result of this pissing-off of dispatchers was for emergency services to engage their snark-emitters on social media, informing everyone that abusing 911 services could result in arrest and that they wouldn't get cable in prison, either."

If you aren't going to arrest people for this, why even have the law? Calling 911 here was clearly illegal. If I were in charge, if there was an officer free I would send them over immediately. Have the officer act friendly, get the person to state they just called 911 because their cable was out, and then put them in handcuffs.

Re: Life threatening?

If someone stole your car ten seconds ago, that's not life threatening, but it's also totally appropriate to call 911.

It's legal to do so, but probably not the best use of 911 resources. It's not like they're going to rush right out with a forensics team to gather clues that will degrade if not attended to immediately. What they'll do is send a cop, take your report, and leave. It would be just as effective to call their nonemergency line.

Norwich/Norwalk Quoted Article Edited without Update

Hello, your article caught my eye as a former resident of Norwich, CT. I wanted to see what my silly former neighbors were up to, so I opened the link to the original article, and it appears they changed the name of the town to Norwalk, a completely different town in CT. Must've been a mistake on their part for the original posting, and they failed to properly note that the article has been updated.

Actually, the cable/internet/phone was out for about three hours. It came back on briefly twice, but then went out again. It went off a few minutes after 6PM and wasn't back on reliably until about 9PM.

I tried calling Cablevision's customer service line a couple times, but it was busy.